


Roman Candle Hearts

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hold Me Tight Or Don't, M/M, Mania, Polyamory, Songwriting, Tales from 2017, Touring, Tryst Theory, lyrics, relationship anarchy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 22:54:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13374795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Ever since the hiatus, Pete and Patrick have been careful: careful with each other, careful for the band. Being together was their most expensive mistake. It nearly cost them everything. No one wants to upset the balance now. Do they?Or: Tryst Theory explains the re-record of MANIA.





	Roman Candle Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you to the irreplaceable [LadySmutterella](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySmutterella/pseuds/LadySmutterella), whose wisdom I aggressively disregarded while writing this fic. She is utterly blameless for whatever lies within. Owe you, love. <3
> 
> MANIA COMES OUT IN FIVE DAYS AND I WANTED YOU ALL TO HAVE THIS!

 

No one says it, but they’re all being careful.

In a hotel room in Japan, Patrick plays a demo for Pete. Pete’s eyes light up in that way Patrick used to burn for, die for. Oh, how Patrick would spin for him then: anything to dazzle, anything to invite that genius glow. The way Pete used to look at him, it gave him goosebumps. Gave him chills. Gave him racing thoughts and the swollen heart to match—what a catch.

That look—it doesn’t matter what it does to Patrick now. That part of their lives is behind them, eight years silvered, buried, forgotten. Everyone agrees this is what they want. Everyone agrees this is for the better.

So they’re careful.

Except—Pete hears the demo, and he goes incendiary. As if the energy of the track, like the lightning that animated Frankenstein’s monster, gives him a whole new way to be alive. With his signature all-or-nothing, jacked-in-or-totally-absent intensity, he says, “This is the next record.”

“I’m not ready,” Patrick says. The way Pete’s looking at him, it’s like the eyes of the wolf upon him. He feels like what he said wasn’t specific enough and doesn’t know which part, or in which direction, he wants to clarify. Into the pause he adds, “For a record.”

Pete tips his head, his eye sockets burning with stars. “Then why play me that song? Provocative. Exciting. Fucking brilliant. How could I hear that and not _want to_?” Pete’s mouth stretches slow into a smile, the words dripping filthy with significance. Patrick prickles with sense memory. He knows exactly how it feels when that smile is shaped over his own skin. He knows how it feels when the lips part, when teeth nick, when tongue…

Patrick has too many memories.

Pete leans near and murmurs, “I think you must want me to make you.”

 

Before anyone can catch their breath, Patrick and Pete are on a radio show, dropping the single just hours after they finish it, announcing a new album they can barely feel the shape of from this distance. _Mania_ , they’re calling it. As if no one remembers the circumstances under which Pete last penned an album about madness.

As if the difference between the mania of one and the madness shared by two is completely unremarkable. As if no one else aches with how those two might look exactly the same, if you took the right perspective. The _wrong_ perspective.

 

Patrick packs up his things, moves into the studio space he keeps in Burbank for the duration. For the _album_. For the madness. His family—Elisa, this kids—move more slowly. They’ll visit him in a few weeks, a month, whenever it’s convenient with Elisa’s job. It’s a great studio, 30 minutes north of LA in a parallel universe with no traffic, but it’s not much as a living space. He’s got a dorm fridge, a microwave, and a futon stuck up in a loft. Climbing a ladder to get to bed makes him feel like being seven years old, sharing a bunk bed with his brother, or being 23 and Christmas-Eve excited over having enough money to rent a tour bus that had _beds_ in it.

He won’t be lonely. He’ll be writing. Besides, He’ll fly home for weekends. It’s not like he’d be very present anyway: at the start of a record, he vanishes, disappearing behind headphones and laptops and guitars. A melody and not a man. He’ll be churning out demos more intently than his own heart is beating for the foreseeable future. Even when he’s in the house, he won’t really be there.

He’ll be in that hollowed-hallowed writing space he holds open in his head, his heart. The hearth of the creative spark that animates his life. The wound that he holds open.

The place where he meets Pete.

The trapdoor through which Pete steals back in.

The secret rendezvous where Pete will always find him.

 

Patrick is the slow one, the traditionalist. He is careful. He wants things to be perfect, and then he wants to do perfect five more times and select the best one. Pete is not like that. Pete is sudden, Pete is urgent. They combine in—well. In remarkable ways.

Each album they have written has been landmarked by arguments: some bitter and acid, some violent and hot, some professional and cold. Some friendly and characterized by half-buried humor, like they’re both amused but neither dares laugh. These conflicts are the milestones, the roadmap, the spider’s web that outlines and contains the album. They are the heat that forges the songs into steel, til even Fall Out Boy’s misses are sonically solid and lyrically meant. They don’t misstep. They don’t make songs they aren’t proud of.

(Pete and Patrick make plenty of mistakes, but their songs are never among them.)

Pete and Patrick haven’t slept together in eight years.

After the hiatus—after the hiatus, there was a mix of thin-ice terror and new-penny shine. They were all so excited, all four of them, to try it a different way. To proceed with caution, to focus on the art, to close no doors and make no exclusions. They were transparent, democratic, _kind_. Patrick was freshly wed, flush with conviction. Pete did not want to drive everyone away again.

So they bickered politely over the songs, Patrick always balking at Pete’s adventurous suggestions. The songs Patrick trusted least became their biggest hits, as they always had—Pete’s gift ran true. They wrote better, closer to the vein of their own sound, with Joe polishing them up after they’d tugged each other in different directions. They argued with their producers, with management, with anyone but each other. The heat built up between them, and their caution and their respect and their commitments to other people, to their families, kept them honest. Kept them clean. For once.

Then they wrote _American Beauty/American Psycho_. They spent the better part of two years on the road. Together. _Feeling_ it, every intensity, every high and every nostalgia and all the new things too, the things they were never coolheaded or attentive enough to cultivate in their youth. In every song, Pete wrote, _our time is now, if you want it to be_. And track after track, Patrick answered, _just hold on. Hold on_.

“We still have that fire and passion, but it’s not directed at each other anymore. Because we know what the other guy is thinking and we know where he’s coming from,” Patrick tells Kerrang. Careful and polite, they both try to act like it’s true.

So yes. This new record feels dangerous. Of course it does. It feels like Pete is waiting for Patrick to answer his question. Like Pete is being as patient as he can be, which is still not very patient. Things haven’t just healed between them, between the band—they have filled their faultlines in with gold, like _kintsugi_ , like Japanese teacups. They are stronger than they have ever been. The band is truer, their hearts more steady, their friendships less complicated and with far greater capacity for honesty.

For love.

Patrick’s life is so, so good.

So he must be careful.

If they let the heat build up this time, Patrick fears he will burn.

*

It’s watching Patrick lay down vocals for Champion, his face like a fist, his eyes squeezed shut, his brow damp and his head thrown back. His freckle just visible under the brim of his baseball cap. His knees almost buckling in the booth as he belts out, voice catching and tearing on his sincerity: _I can do anything, I can do anything._

That’s when Pete decides. After what they’ve lived through? After what they’ve come back from? They can do—anything.

Patrick is catching his breath, sparkling with sweat, in the studio after. His cheeks are pink with the imprints of headphones. Pete can’t think of a moment he’s loved Patrick more.

Impulsive. Honest. Stupid. Pete asks, “Is this making you feel anything?”

Patrick wipes his forehead on his sleeve. On anyone else, this would be gross. Because it’s Patrick, Pete wants to offer his entire outfit, and then his skin, as a sweat rag.

“…the songs, you mean?”

“Sure,” says Pete. “Do you feel—what you want to be feeling?”

Patrick bites his lip. He looks sixteen years old when he does that. Pete is transported back in time, feels dizzy. Feels tingly. Feels a lot of things.

“I guess… no,” Patrick says. “What do you feel?”

“Like what we have is good—um. Definitely. But. Do you—like it?”

“You’re asking if I like… what we have.”

“Yeah.”

Patrick’s going to chew his lip off his face at this rate. “I thought _you_ liked it,” he says at last.

Pete laughs, a little. “And I thought you did. I thought you wanted it this way.”

“Fuck,” says Patrick sagely.

Pete nods slowly, chooses his words with care. “I guess it feels like we’ve been holding back. Like if we were willing to challenge ourselves, we could have something better.”

“We aren’t arguing,” Patrick points out. “None of us. We’re all just—yes men. Complimenting each other and… not pushing. Making up our minds too fast, not taking chances. Racing for some arbitrary deadline.”

“Like we’re trying to make everyone happy, and really we’re making no one happy.” They’re over halfway done with the album. Saying this out loud—realizing that neither of them are proud of the songs—that’s intense enough. Pete isn’t sure if Patrick is with him on the other level of this conversation.

Patrick tips his shoulder into Pete’s, shoving him just a little. “I haven’t cursed you out even once,” he observes, laughing a little.

“I’m suffering a deficiency of abusive text messages,” Pete jokes back. “Maybe we should… trust ourselves… to do it right?”

Pete can’t tell if Patrick hears what he’s asking. The intensity of his blue-grey gaze suggests he does. “So what are you suggesting we do?”

Pete takes a breath. “What if we start over? Try again?”

Patrick has started pacing, four steps out and four steps back. He’s rubbing his arm absently in thought. Suddenly he pauses, casts a sharp look at Pete. “The record. We’re still talking about the record?”

Pete nods vaguely. They are, and they aren’t. His hands shake as he says, “If we aren’t feeling what we want to feel… maybe we need to give ourselves a second chance.”

“A second session.” Patrick looks far away. He has his composing face on, color high and eyes starry, like he’s already writing new songs in his head. Pete loves the way he looks so… uncomposed. “We’ll have to push the release date back. Spend more time in the studio after the tour.” Patrick comes back to reality enough to narrow his eyes suspiciously at Pete. “You’re not saying this just to lock me into a second Mania support tour?”

Pete grins at that. Suspicion and grump are how Patrick says _yes_. “You were locked into a big purple summer tour the minute you met me,” Pete says. “Before, even. You love summer touring. Sweatin’ and bussin’. That’s how you roll.”

Patrick grins back. “How’s that line go again? ‘I never say no to you’?”

Pete throws an arm over Patrick’s shoulder. He does not think about all the times Patrick _has_ said no, all the times Patrick has even more damningly chosen not to answer. What he says is, “When? _When_ will you learn the lyrics?”

“When you write better ones,” Patrick says. “Speaking of—if we’re doing this, Wentz? Write me some good songs.”

 

Not even a week after they push back the album release, buying themselves four more months together, Pete shows up at Patrick’s door with the lyrics that will become Real Ones. They’re on creased notebook paper, the unlined kind he prefers, in Pete’s messy all-caps scrawl with shooting stars doodled up the sides. He doesn’t write them metered, broken up along verse lines. He hands Patrick a page that reads plainly:

_I was an only child of the universe til I found you. you are the sun, I’m just the planets spinning around you. you’re too good to be true. you’re the last of a dying breed. I’m here in search of your glory, that ultra-kind of love you never walk away from. I am a collapsing star with tunnel vision only for you. I will shield you from the waves. If they find you, I will protect you. I’m here at the end of infinity with you and I’m done with having dreams. you drain all the fear from me. you’re the last of the real ones._

Patrick, with whom Pete will be living on a bus in six weeks, reads the page once. Twice. He blinks, tips his head to the side like he’s got symphonies going between his ears, and starts to hum. “Yeah,” he says after a brief silence. “I’ve got music for this.”

So it’s Patrick who decides it’s a song. When it could have just as easily been a confession, a declaration, a vow. It’s Patrick who leads Pete into the part of the studio that has no bed in it, just guitars. Pete notices the way Patrick doesn’t want to let him anywhere near the ladder to the loft, not within sightline of the bed. Like if he doesn’t _see_ the mattress he’ll forget what their bodies have made on beds. Like if Patrick keeps him away from horizontal surfaces, he won’t wonder what new tricks they could conjure with all these years passed between them. Like he’s ever forgotten the taste of it. Like closing your eyes is the same as not wanting.

Pete’s sweaty and tense by the time Patrick’s settled at the keyboard and plinking out scales, feeling out the song’s key. Pete paces the little space, trying not to lose his mind, but when Patrick starts to sing? When he takes what Pete’s written and renders it meaningless and truer than ever at once, with just the twist of his voice?

Pete has to get out of there.

He moves too fast to say goodbye.

 

By morning, Patrick has the skeleton of The Last of the Real Ones laid down. He brings reinforcements in the form of Joe when they take it to studio, and he’s so very _casual_. Pete’s dying of it. He wants to strangle Patrick. He wants to devour him. He wants to upset the hourglass and dive back into their past. He wants to travel through their furtive history til he finds the secret to his own happiness. He wants to fuck Patrick in the recording booth, in the backseat of his car, in the hallways, in the hills, on a desert island, on the moon. He wants. Pete _wants_.

The new songs are _good_. They start to fight about them. Reckless, heating up, circling that white-hot center Pete’s certain they both remember. The album is changed, and saved.

Why can’t they be the same?

 

They play Chicago, and if writing was intense when Pete could go lick his wounds in the privacy of his own home, it’s unbearable now. His whole life is a friction burn. At night, the show, the stage, his friends, his fans, his family in the box seats winding up for tour. One month til he’s trapped in a bus with Patrick, reviving this nostalgia every night, the same as it ever was except _not touching_.

Pete hands over lyrics for song after song. He wonders how he could possibly be more obvious. He wonders how he can get Patrick to talk about more than just _the album_. Does he have to write it on his chest? He catches Patrick whistling a fucking bop and the kid is so bright, so sharp, so _genius_ , and Pete loves him so fucking _much_ , that Pete wants to throttle him. It’s frustrating, okay? It’s sexually frustrating and unfair on the order of cosmic, that Patrick exists and Pete does too and they’d be perfect together, star-writ soulmates, only they’ve never been able to get their shit together at the same time and make it work.

Pete feels like a junkie all the time, now, trembling raw, frayed nerve endings, more than want, more than need. He _is_ the spinning planets. He _did_ get sucked out into space. He’s losing his mind up here. He doesn’t know how to get what he wants or what he’d do with it if he got it. He doesn’t want to ruin his good, good life, but he feels like maybe he already has. Why does he have to pick one good thing or another? Why can’t he have both at once? He just wants the sun. He just wants the universe. He just _wants_.

So when he catches Patrick casually whistling something that he can feel already will be a chart-topping song, with suddenness and ferocity, he thinks to himself, _This isn’t how our story ends_.

It’s a prophecy or a promise or a lyric or a wish, or else it’s nothing. Pete can’t tell which.

He writes it down.

 

It’s like Pete knows how to solve all their problems, but then he gets too close to Patrick and he’s drunk, stumbling, totally out of his mind. He forgets. He gets reckless. He makes—mistakes.

He does it because it feels good.

He doesn’t think about what this mistake could cost him.

Pete doesn’t know how hard he can push. Patrick breaks dangerous, he’s learned this before. Deliberate and in slow-motion is how Patrick Stump deconstructs. How Patrick has enough. The first cracks appear in him so far displaced in time from the impact, Pete can do untold damage before he even knows his words have hit the mark. Before he admits what he’s aiming for. He knows because he’s done it before. He knows because when the hiatus came, he thought he’d lost Patrick forever. Maybe he would have, if Soul Punk had gotten the reception it deserved. The universe brought Patrick back to him, like: _okay, idiot, you are entrusted with this precious thing one more time. Don’t fuck it up again._

_Don’t fuck him up._

Pete doesn’t know what he’s doing or how to name the thing he wants. He only knows he wants it.

He dares himself: push harder.

 

The song springs up around them so fast, Pete barely has time to process which lines Patrick pulls, where he puts them. A thousand throw-away scraps of cleverness, the detritus of a poet’s brain, get stitched together and shaped into something plenipotent. What he’s created always takes on so much more life, so much more significance, under Patrick’s lightning touch—like the moment in Wizard of Oz where suddenly the whole world’s in color.

Here is an aspect of their writing process that is not often discussed: Pete writes the words, Patrick writes the music, sure. Everyone knows this. But the process of _arrangement_ is an invisible step wherein Patrick gathers up all of Pete’s words and _chooses_ which ones get attention, which ones get broken into two separate chunks of meaning, which ones get strung together so fast they blur. Which are whispered and which are shouted. Which are repeated, again and again, and which are left on the page, not spoken at all. It’s a conversation, this step: they both have input. Later, Joe and Andy will have input, and the producer; and the way things go during practice and in the sound booth will shape it too. Their songs are living things. But here, at the very beginning, Pete has the chance to say whatever he wants, and Patrick, scalpel-like, chooses and arranges tiny meaty bits of meaning. It’s like sucking crawfish heads, Pete thinks: a disturbing way to find the marrow. To show what Patrick hears, what he wants to hear. To allow Patrick to answer, in Pete’s own voice, til it’s no longer clear who’s saying what. Til together they are a jumbled-up mess, sweet and brainy, with no beginning and no end.

So the thing Patrick whistled in Chicago that was too good to ignore? Turns out it’s part of a track he demoed for the band months ago. No one remembers hearing it, but Patrick gets madder and madder as he shows them the date on the file, so it’s probably true. It got lost in the sea of early demos. Pete’s glad it came back around. Patrick’s the kind of genius who whistles radio gold like it’s a throwaway, like it’s a detergent jingle from the mid-60s, and doesn’t even hear that he’s doing it. It’s Pete’s job to sift through that. He worries, sometimes, about what happens when they aren’t together. Who knows how many platinum singles Patrick has hummed in the shower and then forgotten over the years, without Pete there to listen?

Tonight they’re in downtown Rio de Janeiro, eating empanadas. (“You get empanadas, like, daily in L.A.,” Joe points out, perhaps lobbying for a more adventurous restaurant. “They’re better here in Brazil,” Pete counters. No one can disagree.) They press Patrick to sing them the rough arrangement they all saw him writing on the plane. Finally, he sings part of a verse, under his breath and _a capella_ :

“ _I realized I can’t not be with you. Or be just your friend. I love you to death but I can’t pretend we weren’t lovers first. Confidants but never friends, were we ever friends?_ ”

Of all the insane, provocative, Patrick-can’t-possibly-ignore-this shit Pete wrote down and gave him for this song? This is the last string of words he ever expected to come out of Patrick’s mouth.

Patrick is glaring up at all three of them from under the brim of his grey baseball cap. Andy’s got chimichurri in his beard and doesn’t seem to notice. Joe’s mouth is actually flopped open. They’re looking from Pete to Patrick like they’re the solar eclipse, like in a lifetime they’ve never seen anything like this.

Pete can’t begin to imagine what his own face looks like.

The silence stretches. The chatter and clinking of the indoor part of the restaurant drifts out onto the patio. Insects buzz in the humid evening air. For far too long, no one says anything.

“That bad?” Patrick says at last, in the jokey dad voice he’s been using since he was 16.

Joe and Andy both start talking at once. “Oh my god, look, it’s Marie calling, I gotta take it,” Joe lies baldly, fumbling his clearly inactive cell phone out of his pocket, while Andy announces, “INDIGESTION! Better go for a quick jog.”

“Guys, wait,” Pete says, but what is he supposed to say? ‘I gave him those lyrics, this is my fault, I was trying to ask him to—I don’t know what I was trying to ask him’?

Or, worse: ‘I know what I was trying to ask him but I’m not ready to hear his answer yet’?

Joe pauses, phone in hand, halfway to his feet. He raises his eyebrows like Pete and Patrick are the stupidest people alive. “You need to talk about this and I am _not_ part of that conversation. Martial band law is in effect. Don’t even think about coming back to the hotel until you figure this out.”

“There’s nothing to—” Patrick protests.

Enjoying the drama of the moment, Andy smacks his fist on the table. “Martial band law!” he yells.

Pete holds his hands up in surrender. “Fine. You two are lousy dinner companions anyway.”

Joe dumps the remaining empanadas into a napkin with great dignity. Then they’re gone, leaving behind an ominous awkwardness.

If Pete feels dread, Patrick evidently feels nothing, because he’s just fixing Pete with this flat, sea-at-storm stare.

“Well _they_ overreacted,” Pete says, hoping he can make the terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach dissipate via jokes.

“Did they?” Patrick asks.

“Why are you looking at me like this is _my_ fault?” Pete grumbles. He studies the crumb pattern on the tablecloth with the intensity of a crime scene investigator because he can’t handle Patrick’s face.

“You wrote it, didn’t you?”

“I write a lot of things! You’re the one who sang it at dinner.”

Patrick looks unimpressed by this disavowal. Pete decides everything about this situation is untenable. Not just the Brazilian standoff that’s happening—the whole thing. The living-and-dying-for-Patrick-Stump’s-regard thing. The in-love-with-his-best-friend thing. The great-girlfriend-kids-family-life, still-need-Patrick thing. Being in this band is going to kill him. Recording this album is going to kill him. He thought he got the last of Patrick out of his system years ago, but he’s got the withdrawal shakes so bad, it’s like their last kiss was yesterday.

Don’t. Don’t think about the last kiss. Pete feels like a supersenior at a rehab clinic. Every time he gets sober enough to graduate, he takes another hit off his memories. _When I said I’d return to you, I meant more like a relapse_. All these years and he’s still too fucking dumb not to retox.

Pete’s on a carousel of self-recrimination and still, Patrick is just _staring_. “We’ve been blazing a reckless track, I know that. Maybe it’s dangerous. Maybe we’re being dangerous. But—I didn’t think, I don’t think—I don’t think I’m burning alone?” Pete sneaks a glance up at Patrick’s impassive face. It’s like he’s made of stone. Pete thinks of Patrick’s skin, cool and firm like marble. Thinks of all the places it’s soft, smooth, veined, hard.

Pete should go back to thinking about empanadas.

“We’re friends, Pete,” Patrick says at last. His voice is checked, schooled flat in a way Pete can’t interpret. He can’t tell if Patrick’s answering his question or talking about the song. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same question. It’s always been the same question.

It costs Pete more than his life is worth to do it, but he nods his head. “Okay,” he tells the tablecloth. “I’ll write—something else. I must have—well. I fucked up.”

“Hey,” Patrick says, sharply enough that Pete lifts his gaze and finds Patrick’s eyes. God, meeting Patrick’s eyes stills him to his core. He feels his heart tremor because the rest of him can’t, all his nervous energy bound up suddenly in ice. He wants to clasp Patrick’s hands to his loyal heartbeat, wants to plead, wants to spend the silver coin of his tongue til he spins the right line, finds the magic words to make all his dreams come true. He doesn’t want to wait anymore. He can’t bear to be told no. He just wants—he just wants everything. Why does everyone always tell him no? Can’t they see that love never divides, only multiplies? That more love in the world can never be a bad thing?

But Pete knows. Suddenly and terribly and all at once. Maybe he should have known it sooner. Maybe he did. Maybe it’s writ deep and mordant in his bones. Maybe that’s why his heart flutters like he’s being hunted. Maybe that’s why his blood screams impatient, barreling through the corridors of carious veins. He knows it now: Patrick thinks their love is a bad thing.

“It’s a good song,” Patrick’s saying. “I want to keep it. These are the words I want to be singing, on stage and in front of everyone. Maybe it’s not easy, but it makes me feel—what I want to be feeling.”

But Pete’s barely listening. “Hold me tight or don’t,” Pete tells the tablecloth with more vitriol than it deserves. He stands up abruptly, casts his eyes down at Patrick, and from far away feels himself shrug. Pete can’t just put his whole life on hold while he waits for Patrick. This record, writing with his best friends, touring the world playing songs they believe in—who’s to say he _doesn’t_ have everything? Maybe this is it. Maybe it’s the worst kind of arrogance to ask for more.

Maybe.

Humility does not sit naturally on Pete.

Pete shrugs at Patrick and tastes the words again. “Hold me tight,” he says, reckless and burning and shuddering and awful, “or don’t.”

*

Patrick survives Brazil. Barely.

Here’s how:

  1. He pours himself out on stage in South America, plays til he’s panting and ragged and soaked with sweat, til he passes out in his hotel room before he can even finish getting himself off, wakes up sore and halfway out of his sweaty pants sometime before dawn. He feels it, the wave, the mania. He feels it strike him and drag him down. He chokes on lungs full of undertow and lets that empty and exhilarate and exhaust him. It buys him some time. It keeps him away from Pete.



(One night. It costs him everything to survive one night. He doesn’t think about what will happen in October, when they’re living on a bus together, playing songs that are blazing and undeniable for thousands of people each night, feeling this raw and this sparking and this dizzy-deep. When they’re sleeping three feet apart. When it’s as easy as lifting a curtain. As easy as reaching into a bunk. As easy as—)

  1. Instead of thinking about October, Patrick thinks about Chicago. He just needs a break. He can write long distance for a few days, sleep in his own bed with his own wife.
  2. Patrick doesn’t think about the words _the distance between us, it sharpens me like a knife_. Not even once.



 

The thing about the inferno, the way you end up in hell: it’s not an accident. It’s not _oops, yawning pit of fire and damnation_. It’s that at some point, you start to want to burn.

At least, that’s what it’s like with Pete Wentz. Patrick imagines it’s the same with other devils, other sins.

 _Let’s meet in the purgatory of my hips and.._. Words Pete wrote while they were together, or—finding themselves together, again and again, without really talking about what it was or what it meant or what they wanted it to be. The closest thing they ever had to a capital-r Relationship. A fucking disaster, a literal shipwreck. Patrick knows that. Pete knows that. It would be stupid to forget.

So why does Patrick find himself, on the flight back to the States, writing those words in his own hand? Why does he find himself tearing the page out of his notepad, dirty as any secret, and folding it small enough to be overlooked by his better judgment? Why does he find himself trying to talk himself in-and-out of slipping the note, furtive and foolish, to Pete? (Pete, who’s always been anxious on planes; Pete, who on an international flight might very much like to be distracted…)

It’s simple.

It’s because Patrick wants to burn.

Not careful, then. Not precise. Certainly not perfect. This is how Pete finds him. Every time, this is how Pete finds him.

They’re in San Gabriel, literally filming a video about two lovers who can only be reunited on one day of the year, and he finally hits a point where he can suspend his disbelief no longer. He knows what Pete’s asking him. It’s not exactly an unspoken request, is it? The dead know what Pete’s asking by now. That’s kind of the point. _Say I’m the only one, even if it’s not true. Hold me tight, or don’t. There’s nothing more cruel than to be loved by everyone but you._

How many years has Patrick been running scared of his own answer?

Costumed dancers, crew, and extras are everywhere. Lighting techs and makeup artists run around with equal desperation, clutching the tools of their trade like shields. Pete moves through the crowd with his usual celebrity charisma, the kind Patrick watches him pull out and put on like it’s his stupid L’Aveugle Par Amour jacket. He’s not like that, when it’s not a large-scale Event. The truest version of him, out from the spotlights and distant from what it costs to be the face of Fall Out Boy, is quiet. Dorky. Private instead of showy. Distracted 95% of the time. Kind. Quick with a joke. That smile always ready to spark, lighting up the whole room. Lighting up Patrick’s whole world.

Fuck. Patrick is terrified.

Patrick can’t help himself.

He puts down the guitar he’s been fussing with while he pretends not to visually stalk Pete, makes his excuses to the makeup artist who’s trying to make him less shiny, and cuts across the lawn to the side of his life’s greatest torment. He tugs Pete’s sleeve—he’s wearing such stupid clothes, yet another Gucci hoodie and an actual mesh t-shirt over it, exactly like a kid in a gay club in the year 1990, who can blame Patrick for wanting to take such stupid clothes off of him?—and gestures towards the church with his head. Raising his eyebrows in question, his mouth making a terrible, irresistible moue of concern, Pete follows him. They don’t speak. Patrick doesn’t trust his voice, the one thing he can usually count on.

Maybe it’s profane, pulling Pete into a literal church for this conversation. But maybe it ought to be. If you’re going to sin, might as well go for the big one.

And then they’re here, in a mostly-dark mission. Lighting rigs from the lawn illuminate the stained glass with an unholy intensity, like it’s the Rapture out there. Like the Rapture is possibly conducted via UFOs. Odd swaths of light paint Pete’s face, blue and red and gold, and Patrick finds he can’t read his friend’s expression. He’s got saints on his skin, and shadows. Patrick doesn’t know what he’s doing.

“Are you all right?” Pete asks. His voice is hushed, like he feels the reverence of this place too. Rows of dark, woody-smelling pews stretch across the little clay room, all that separates them from an honest-to-you-know-who altar.  “You’re shaking.”

Pete’s right. Patrick makes fists of his leather jacket, trying to still his trembling flesh. He’s burning from the inside out, now. Years of restraint scald him from the inside. He has to relieve the pressure somehow. His voice comes out weak, like he’s about to cry. Maybe he is. “You’re the only one,” Patrick whispers into the dark. He begs Pete to understand him. He can’t think of any other words.

Patrick thinks about fifteen years ago, playing house shows in matching outfits, black hats black ties, and how he loved Pete then. The way he wanted him. He thinks of how he loved Pete when they were both straight-edge kids, scared of losing control, isolated and insulated from the world outside their band. He thinks of how he loved Pete when they lived out of a van together, how bad Pete smelled and how the whole van would shake late into the night if Patrick jerked off too hard, looking at the streetlights hitting Pete’s face, grossed out by himself but not able to stop either. He thinks about the first time he heard his own voice on the radio, his own song. The first time he saw himself on TV. He thinks about how he wanted Pete them, how it felt like setting himself on fire, how scary it was when everything else was so big and burning—how scary and how safe. He thinks about hotel suites and champagne and how Pete’s eyes looked, amber against silk, and the first time they kissed. The first time they fucked. God, he loved Pete then.

He thinks about breaking up. He thinks about sitting next to a Pete wearing a fucking leather hoodie and a benzo-induced glaze over his sad, sad eyes, singing his own goodbye song while the audience threw water bottles and shouted abuse, while Pete couldn’t even look at him straight-on. Even then, especially then. He thinks about hiatus and how he played with hating Pete, because that was easiest. Because it didn’t feel so different from love. It was drowning-deep. It was hot. It killed him and revived him. It ate him alive.

They didn’t speak for weeksmonthsyears, and he loved Pete then.

Patrick has always been this desperate. He’s always been this in love.

He’s always been this terrified.

So Patrick says, “You’re the only one.” Even though it’s not true. Even though it is.

*

Patrick kisses like ripping apart. Pete’s not a planet spinning, he’s a planet _ending_. This kiss hits him unlike any before it. His mouth is an open wound and the kiss is bigger than a fist, it’s a meteor, it’s a flaming fucking comet, and Pete is destroyed.

His knees go, and Patrick presses him back into the wall. The chapel wall. They kiss under god’s eye, under Jesus on the cross and the artificial star-bright moonlight. They kiss like pagans and they kiss like saints. They kiss like alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Pete moans supplication and Patrick presses him harder, soft heat insatiable.

Patrick kisses like devouring. Eight years now Pete’s gone without being devoured.

 

“I haven’t,” Pete tells him. Flat on his back in a hotel room, a familiar fucking place to find himself, with Patrick Stump above him. It’s been so long. It hasn’t been a day. Pete says, “I haven’t since you.”

Patrick’s either gone for good or realer than he’s ever been, because Pete doesn’t recognize the look in his blue, blue eyes. His pale pink-flushed skin, his tiny ginger freckles, the glowing coral coal of his mouth. The heat unfurling from within, and Pete’s body remade in blister. “You’re saying you haven’t been fucked since 2009?” Patrick asks.

Pete’s hips twitch in time with Patrick’s lip twist. Is it that he’s never ached like this before, or that he’s been aching so long he doesn’t know the difference? Patrick’s fingers in him and he can’t speak. His breathing hitches, his panting as much as answer as any.

Patrick’s grin is a wicked thing, and he leans down to steal whatever breath was left on Pete’s lips. “I better do a good job, then,” he says, curling his fingers. “Hold you tight, right?”

“Or d—” Patrick pushes into him, the feeling so much _more_ than Pete remembers, and this time it’s Pete who forgets the words.

*

There’s a moment, after. They stare at the ceiling, sweat cooling their skins, their hands tangled together between them. Patrick’s body is alive with the memory of every sin, tonight’s and all the nights before. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to this. He doesn’t want the consequences to fade away with sunrise.

This is a new feeling.

Is it so crazy, that he doesn’t want to regret one of the best parts of his life anymore? That finally, at the tender age of 33, he is tired of being cautious? His cardigan lies rumpled on the floor. Pete lies long and naked beside him.

Pete’s body these days. The way he’s known it so long. The way he can see its changes: the places it was soft and round and youthful, once, plush like velour; the places it has hardened into muscle and bone now, and the new softnesses uncovered by time. Tattoos Patrick’s never touched before tonight: new mysteries on such familiar skin. A Pete who died with the Queen of Hearts in his hand. A Pete who died in the desert by Patrick’s own hook hand. A Pete who lived, lived, lives.

His Pete.

Patrick thinks that maybe the reason he has burned so long is because he is fireproof. Maybe the fear is the mistake, not the fire.

His beautiful Pete.

So in this moment, into this particular after, Pete says, “We aren’t telling people yet, but I should tell you. We’ve been trying, and… Meagan’s pregnant.” He pauses, like more love in the world could ever be a bad thing, before adding, “I’m really happy.”

“How long were you going wait to tell me? If tonight didn’t…?” Patrick asks, half-laughing, squeezing Pete’s hand.

“Well, there was always the chance you wouldn’t notice,” Pete says in his stupid jokey voice. Patrick loves him, has always loved him. After everything, it really is that simple.

“So what do we do?” Patrick asks the ceiling.

“Does the answer have to be limits?” Pete rolls, his body eclipsing Patrick’s prone arm, his nakedness invading what little clarity Patrick possesses in this emptied-out heaving _after_. “I mean. She knows how I feel about you. Everyone does. Maybe it’s not just… weddings and ever-after and death do us part?”

“When have you ever had any of those things,” Patrick says, and he’s all-laughing now. He rolls too, so they are nearly nose to nose, sharing a pillow and a heartbeat and two lungs’ worth of air. Sharing a universe between them. Sharing one overlapping inch. They shape a Venn diagram, bodies hearts and lives.

Pete shows his teeth smiling. “Stop,” he laughs back. “I mean. I just mean. Maybe if I explain to Meagan. I can love her and I can love you too. My heart doesn’t have a bottom, Rick. It doesn’t work like that for me. Loving someone doesn’t mean I have… _less_ … for anyone else.”

Patrick thinks about this. Patrick thinks about the way Pete always says so easily things he hasn’t in years found words for.

Patrick thinks about the way he loves Elisa. The way he loves his son. The way he loves his band. The way he loves Pete.

He knows already the number of chambers in his heart. Like cartridges in a shotgun, he knows what he can do with them.

He knows there is no limit to his capacity for love.

“You’ve been spending too much time with Andy,” Patrick tells his first love, his best love, his only and not-only love. He thinks about how Andy explains relationship anarchy (loudly, ad nauseam, irresistibly). He thinks about all the things Elisa has agreed to gladly, to make him happy, to make their relationship work. He thinks there’s a non-zero chance she’ll agree to this too. She knows how he feels about Pete, what there was—is—between them. She’s always known. Some days it feels like the whole world has. All Patrick has to do is… stop denying it.

Pete’s grinning his Peter Pan, catch-me-if-you-can grin. Across the pillow, he tells Patrick, “All I want is everything.”

Patrick wants to give it to him.

*

They aren’t careful. They don’t have to be, anymore.

They have forever, don’t they?

Forever to burn.


End file.
